Hope for the Church

On October 11 the people of God will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s opening.

The wind of resistance is still blowing today- Fr Alfred Micallef

Fifty years is a long time. Those old enough to have witnessed the event are getting fewer. Many youn­ger people, including a number of priests and bishops, do not know the pre-Council Church except through hearsay and literature, with the possibility of a diminished capability of appreciating its significance.

Vatican II was announced by Pope John XXIII soon after his election. From the very beginning, his idea encountered resistance. Cardinal Spellman of New York reacted by saying that this initiative was doomed to fail. Others insisted with the Pope that the time framework he had set for its preparation was too short. Pope John reacted by shortening it even further, bringing the opening of the Council forward.

Faced with the challenges of modernism, the Church had taken a defensive attitude, assuming a fort­ress mentality. Pope John understood that this mentality was detrimental to the Church’s mission to evangelise the world. Being a man of dialogue, he wanted the Church to enter into dialogue with the world.

Dialogue frightens people be­cause it implies that none of the partners in the dialogue has the whole truth and that they can augment their truth only by opening themselves up to the truth of each other. So, Pope John’s initiative was a declaration that the Holy Spirit was working also in the world.

Resistance to the Council continued even after its conclusion. Pope Paul VI, Pope John’s successor, had to use hard words when faced with the resistance of the Roman Curia: “Whatever were our opinions about the Council’s various doctrines before its conclusions were promulgated, today our adherence to the decisions of the Council must be wholehearted and without reserve.”

Alas, the wind of resistance is still blowing today. Pope Paul did his utmost to have near unanimity backing the various decrees of the Council and he succeeded splendidly. As a consequence, nobody can honestly say that Vatican II was not the mind of the Church.

Today a huge debate is going on about whether the Council had broken with tradition or whether it continued in line with tradition but initiated a process of reform.

Speaking on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its closure, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the “hermeneutic of reform”.

During the Council itself two words were used: aggiornamento, coined by Pope John, and ressourcement, which means purifying Catholic thought from the layers accumulated over time and acquired from particular cultures – especially from the juridicism of late neoscholasticism – in order to understand it, as much as possible, in its original purity by going to the sources. This is moving forward by understanding our origins better. It can hardly be called a rupture with tradition, as some are suggesting.

The Council did not change Church doctrine but it did change the pastoral outlook. In What happened at Vatican II, historian John O’Malley discusses the innovations brought about by Vatican II.

In the discourse quoted above, Pope Paul further adds: “The Council was something very new: not all were prepared to understand and accept it. But now the conciliar doctrine must be seen as belonging to the magisterium of the Church and, indeed, be attributed to the breath of the Holy Spirit.”

One important area in which this change is felt is the celebration of the Eucharist. As a young man I remember the enthusiasm the first time Maltese was introduced in Mass.

We began by saying the Gloria and the Creed in Maltese. Today, we are witnessing a movement towards restoring Latin, also in Malta.

Possibly, these and other changes –which I will discuss in next week’s article – provoked a crisis of identity in some. And we are back to the mentality of a fortress Church defending itself from the world. Fear is making us retreat behind the walls and charge our guns. Obviously, this is not the way forward.

alfred.j.micallef@um.edu.mt

Fr Micallef is a member of the Society of Jesus.